ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute Conducts Successful Interoperability Trial

ControlGlobal.com
11/14/2012

By Control Global Staff

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- The ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute (WCI) has announced the completion of another successful interoperability trial in which it verified its new Generic Client Interface (GCI) specification, which is applicable to ANSI/ISA-100.11a-based gateways.

Conducted at ISA headquarters in North Carolina, gateways from Yokogawa, Honeywell and Nivis successfully demonstrated interoperability with a WCI test client. The first production client to use GCI will be GE's System 1 product, which was also successfully tested during the trial.

System 1 is GE's patented conditioning monitoring software platform for real-time optimization of equipment and selected processes, condition monitoring and event diagnostics.

ANSI/ISA-100.11a is flexibly designed to support legacy and/or proprietary protocols, and the GCI is an example of how the ANSI/ISA-100.11a wireless standard can deliver that result.

"We are excited to see the success of this interoperability test conducted by the ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute. WCI plays a crucial role in the success of ISA100 in the industrial space," said Hitoshi Yasui, general manager of Wireless Research and Development Business Unit, Yokogawa Electric Corporation. "Yokogawa has demonstrated leadership in defining, developing and deploying the ISA100 family of standards. We believe unique features of ISA100 allow Yokogawa to provide solutions to meet our industrial customers' requirements. Customer satisfaction has always been, and will always be, the primary goal of Yokogawa."

Andre Ristaino, managing director of the WCI, added, "With the successful outcome of the test, we continue to look forward to additional interoperability tests planned for the coming year with more ISA100-certified products in the queue to confirm the scalability, reliability and performance benefits of the ANSI/ISA-100.11a standard."

The ANSI/ISA-100.11a industrial wireless networking standard is the first in the ISA100 open family of standards, focusing on the needs of process industries. The ISA100 Wireless Compliant certification ensures that supplier companies deliver interoperable wireless products and provides users the freedom to choose best-of-breed ANSI/ISA-100.11a devices from any supplier. Built from the ground up using open industry standards, ANSI/ISA-100.11a includes native IPv6 addressing, 6LoWPAN technology, AES-128 encryption, IEEE 802.15.4 radios, duocast transmission and object technology, enabling control in the field.

ISA-100.11a-2011 received committee approval in 2011 and formal ANSI approval in January 2012. Headed toward internationalization, ANSI/ISA-100.11a-2011 was accepted as new work in IEC SC65C and as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) IEC 62734 in 2011.

Planned additions to the ISA100 family of standards include support for backhaul functionality, factory automation, power management, asset and people tracking and other key use-cases. Details on the approved standard, the ISA100 roadmap and use-case presentations are available at www.isa.org/ISA100.